Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss (33 page)

Xochi spoke to Javi in rapid-fire Spanish, pointing down the street. Javi nodded and took off in that direction.

“Wow,” Claudia said. “Is that your boyfriend?”

“Sometimes,” Xochi replied.

“If that was my boyfriend,” Claudia said, staring after Javi, “it would definitely be
all
the time. We’d never leave the house.”

Dean looked over at Sam, who was suppressing a smirk.

“Looks like you’re not the center of the female universe after all, dude,” Sam said.

“Come on,” Dean said. “I’d look good in a loincloth too, wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t ever want to know the answer to that question,” Sam replied.

Xochi came over to Dean.

“I told Javi to spread the word that one of the gangs is planning a drive-by,” she said. “If we’re lucky, that will get some of these people out of the street. Meanwhile, we need to start searching these storefronts to see if we can find the empty green one from Claudia’s vision. This is where Elvia will be opening the gate.”

There was a low rumble under their feet, like the subway or a passing truck. Xochi gripped Dean’s arm.

“They’re here,” Xochi said. “Can’t you feel it?”

“I don’t feel anything,” Sam said.

But Dean did. It was horrible, a pulsating, unnatural resonance that felt like a more subtle version of the work that Xochi’s grandmother had done on his wounded soul. The healing scar on his hand was throbbing like a second heart.

“Look!” Claudia said, pointing to a small skirmish going on about a half a block away. It resembled a chaotic bar fight, except more than half of the participants had large, gaping wounds on their arms and faces. Mortal wounds that didn’t seem to be slowing them down or affecting them in any way. The fight was swiftly spreading through the gathered celebrants. People were screaming and frantically trying to get away, but it was too crowded and there was nowhere for them to go.

Then, the plate-glass front of one of the shops exploded outwards and Dean got his first look at a Star Demon.

The creature was so big that it had to crouch down to fit through the shattered plate-glass storefront. The first thing Dean saw was long, black machete-clawed fingers clinging to the edges of the broken window. Then a massive head the size of a La-Z-Boy. Corpse-white skin, tiny matte-black eyes, and a wide, under-slung jaw like a lantern fish. Its crooked, obsidian teeth were slick with blood. In place of hair was a crown of gory, bone-white horns and glossy black quills. As it crawled free of the pale-green storefront, Dean could see its emaciated torso was distinctly female. A necklace of severed human hands and impossibly beating hearts swung between the grayish flaps of its crone-like breasts. Bloodshot human eyes studded the long white arms and legs, blinking and rolling as it stood to its full height of nine feet or more.

“Run!” Xochi said.

The four of them tore down the street with a riot on their heels. The soulless zombie victims were spreading through the crowd as swiftly as the mounting panic, and both ends of the street were blocked by competing taco trucks set up to serve the festival crowd.

“In here,” Sam said, pushing open the door to a small shoe store and waving them inside.

As soon they were through the door, Sam and Dean worked together to pull down the security gate while Xochi shoved Claudia behind a rack of high-heeled boots and drew her .45. Seconds later, the glass shattered and a dozen bloody, reaching arms were shoved through the spaces in the gate, rattling it on its hinges.

“Headshots?” Dean asked, raising the shotgun.

“Yes,” Xochi said, demonstrating by putting a bullet into the forehead of a screeching, middle-aged woman with a bad perm, wearing a sparkly red tube-top.

The moment the zombie fell, three more took her place.

“Come on,” Sam said, gesturing to an open door that revealed a flight of stairs on the other side.

Xochi sent Claudia up the steps first and Sam followed close behind.

“Go,” Dean said, letting an old guy in a Raiders cap have it with the shotgun.

The security gate was starting to give, peeling loose from its moorings in one corner. The zombies would be in the shop in under a minute.

Dean shot a skinny young man trying to push through the gap and then ran backwards toward the stairs, reloading as he went.

He got to the door just as the zombies busted through the gate. He slammed the door, shoved a large metal garbage can up under the doorknob, then followed Xochi up the stairs.

The second floor was just a bunch of empty offices so they continued up to the roof. The roof access door was reinforced steel, locked with a key lock. Another damn Medeco.

“Dean?” Sam asked.

“On it,” Dean said, stepping up to the door and pulling out his lock picks.

His hands were shaking with adrenaline. He took in a long deep breath and struggled to focus, shutting out everything but the feel of the tumbler.

“Dean,” Xochi said urgently. “They’re in the stairwell.”

“Come on, baby,” Dean whispered between clenched teeth. “Come on, come on, come on.”

Sam and Xochi were firing down the stairs, but Dean ignored it. Focusing.

The lock gave, and popped open.

Dean let out his breath in a shaky laugh and pushed the door open.

“Claudia!” he yelled, pushing the girl through the door and out onto the roof.

Sam followed Claudia and then Xochi. Dean was about to go through the door himself when he felt clutching hands grab the back of his shirt.

Dean twisted his body around to face Xochi’s friend Javi. His chin was slick with gore, skull make-up smeared and ruined. He’d lost the feathered headdress at some point and there were giant teeth-marks in his shaved scalp. He screamed, blood-webbed teeth snapping inches from Dean’s face. Dean fought to shove Javi back far enough to raise the sawed-off for a headshot but the dancer was incredibly strong. Several more zombies were barreling up the stairs behind Javi. Dean had only seconds before they would be on him.

Then, the crack of a gunshot inches from Dean’s ear and Javi’s forehead burst open with an explosion of brains and bone. Dean kicked the dancer back down the stairs and Xochi was at his side, pulling him through the door and slamming it in the faces of the oncoming zombies.

Xochi and Dean both pressed their backs against the door, expecting to need all of their weight to hold it shut. Amazingly, the lock Dean had picked re-engaged itself as soon as the door closed and after a few moments, the two of them cautiously stepped away.

Dean looked over at Xochi. Her face was stone, eyes cold and emotionless as she efficiently reloaded the .45.

“Thanks,” Dean said.

Xochi nodded without meeting his gaze. He knew better than to say anything else, knowing that this was exactly the way he would react if he were in her shoes. Now was not the time for emotion. That would come later. If there was a later.

Sam and Claudia were both standing at the edge of the roof, looking across an alley at the neighboring building. Dean joined them, looking down at the balls-out chaos ruling the street below.

A second
Tzitzimitl
had crawled out of the empty green shop to join the first, cutting a swath through the terrified crowd. Zombies were everywhere, ganging up on the few remaining living people and dragging them down.

“Where the hell are the police?” Dean asked.

“Police do not come to this part of the
Barrio Bravo
,” Xochi replied. “We need to find a way across to the green store where Elvia has opened the gate.”

“It’s too far to jump,” Sam said. “But look...”

Dean looked at the roof of the building on the other side of the alley. There was a large wooden extension ladder lying near the fire door.

“If we could get that ladder,” Sam said. “We could climb across and from there the buildings are all connected. We could get down into the green shop from above and get to Elvia.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Dean asked. “If we could reach that ladder, we wouldn’t need it.”

Sam didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“Oh, hell, no,” Dean said. “Don’t even think about it.”

“The zombies, they’re chasing souls, right?” Sam said. “So are the Star Demons. I don’t have mine, so wouldn’t they leave me alone?”

“We have no way of knowing that for sure,” Dean said. “What if you’re wrong?”

“What if I’m not?” Sam asked. “I can sneak past them and get into that other building, then lay the ladder across the gap for you guys.”

“Dean,” Xochi said. “This is why I needed Sam for this hunt to be successful. It wasn’t clear until this moment, but I think this... this is his destiny.”

Could that be true? Could it be that Sam was sent back from Hell without his soul for a reason? Could this be the reason, to stop yet another apocalypse? A double-blind deep cover mission into a foreign land where Castiel and all of Heaven’s minions were not allowed to interfere? Maybe so and maybe not, but either way, Dean just wasn’t seeing any other option.

“Dammit, Sammy,” Dean said. “I hate this plan.”

Sam headed over to a rickety fire escape hanging off the side of their building.

“I got this,” Sam said.

Claudia ran to Sam and hugged him. He looked up at Dean and then put his arms briefly around the girl’s shaking shoulders, face still neutral and expressionless.

“Good luck, Sam,” Claudia said.

“I don’t need luck,” Sam replied.

He started climbing down the fire escape, toward the street.

Dean watched his brother descend toward the madness of the street with his fists clenched and his heart in his throat. This
had
to work. It just had to.

When Sam reached the second floor, the fire escape simply ended, the ladder meant to reach the ground level either missing or stolen. He had no choice but to jump down to the sidewalk, right into the thick of the zombies. Which meant there would be nowhere to run if the zombies did go after him.

Sam looked up at Dean, acknowledging him with the slightest nod—then jumped.

He landed hard, knocking over a pair of punk kids with brightly colored mohawks. A heartbeat passed, then another. No reaction from the zombies. They just looked right through Sam.

“Hot damn,” Dean said. “He made it.”

“Dean,” Xochi said softly.

“What?”

“Can I have my hand back?”

Dean looked down and saw that he had one of Xochi’s gloved hands in a vice grip. He let her go and she opened and closed her fingers like they were sore.

“Sorry,” Dean said.

“Where is he going?” Claudia asked.

Dean looked back down at the street and saw Sam weaving through the crowd of zombies, walking right past the door to the neighboring building. He was headed straight for the pair of
Tzitzimimeh
.

“Is he crazy?” Xochi asked, as Sam picked up a broken-off, four-foot length of rusty rebar.

There was about a ten-foot clear area around the long, skinny legs of the demons, littered with skull-faced
Santa Muerte
dolls and mutilated corpses. Sam slowly approached the edge of the clearing. The two demons were turned in opposite directions, one chewing through the rag-doll body of a teenaged girl and the other tipping its massive, oversized head like it was listening to something only it could hear.

Sam took a cautious, sliding step closer, raising the rebar like a samurai sword. Neither demon seemed to notice him.

“They can’t see him,” Xochi said, astounded disbelief in her husky voice. “He is invisible to them.”

Sam lunged at the listening demon, swinging the rebar and shattering nearly half the obsidian teeth in its massive jaw.

The demon screamed and swiped at Sam with its knife-like claws, but Sam danced back and to the left, while the creature lunged right. It was fighting blind, swiping at nothing while Sam snuck up from behind for a second shot.

“He’s going for the teeth,” Dean said. “Just like Bobby said.”

“Without those teeth, it can still attack,” Xochi said. “But it can make no more zombies. It can eat no more souls.”

Sam struck again, knocking out the flailing demon’s remaining teeth then leaping back, out of the way. His arms and face were laced with bleeding cuts, but the cuts were only flesh wounds. He had no soul to eat.

The other demon attacked the now toothless one, the two of them crashing together into the side of a toy store. One of them kicked out at a parked minivan, sending it flying and crashing into the window of the empty green storefront they’d crawled out of.

Sam let the attacking demon have it in the back of the knees, buckling its lanky legs. It spun toward him, jaw snapping inches from Sam’s face as he faded back and then swung for the fences, obsidian teeth fragments flying everywhere.

The first demon lunged at the second, retaliating with wild, vicious swipes of its bloody claws. The two went down together, scattering cars and vendor’s tables.

Sam ran, dodging through hoards of milling, confused zombies and heading for the open door of the building opposite the one where Dean, Xochi and Claudia were trapped. He ducked inside, pulling the door closed behind him.